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Search results for 'infopolitics'

Privacy, copyright, classified documents and state secrets, but also spontaneous network phenomena like flash mobs and hashtag revolutions, reveal one thing – we lost control over the digital world. We experience a digital tailspin, or as Michael Seemann calls it in this essay: a loss of control or Kontrollverlust. Data we never knew existed is finding paths that were not intended and reveals information that we would never have thought of on our own.

Today, Thursday 5 July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files -
more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, ministries
and associated companies, dating from August 2006 to March 2012.

The exposure of undercover policeman Mark Kennedy in the eco-activist
movement revealed how the state monitors and undermines political
activism. This book shows the other grave threat to our political
freedoms - undercover activities by corporations.

Today, Friday 19th June at 1pm GMT, WikiLeaks began publishing The Saudi Cables: more than half a million cables and other documents from the Saudi Foreign Ministry that contain secret communications from various Saudi Embassies around the world. The publication includes "Top Secret" reports from other Saudi State institutions, including the Ministry of Interior and the Kingdom's General Intelligence Services. The massive cache of data also contains a large number of email communications between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign entities. The Saudi Cables are being published in tranches of tens of thousands of documents at a time over the coming weeks. Today WikiLeaks is releasing around 70,000 documents from the trove as the first tranche.

Damascus - Tuesday, 3 July 2012 - Today marks the launch of the #FREEBASSEL
campaign to bring about the release of Bassel Khartabil, known widely
on the Internet and in technology communities as Bassel Safadi. Bassel
is a resident of Damascus, Syria, a technology pioneer and respected
community leader. He is a loving family member and friend to countless
people at home and around the world. He has been detained since March
15, 2012, without trial. Today the campaign learned Bassel is being held
at security detention branch 291 in Kafer Sousa, a facility that was
uncovered in the recent Human Rights Watch report "Syria: Torture
Centers Revealed."

The National Security Agency has
been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international)
phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the
Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay
chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim
states, which the latter publication refers to as country "X".

We, the supporters of the #FREEBASSEL project are inviting every person,
everywhere to make an event on March 15, 2013 with other people in your
city in global solidarity to call for the immediate release of open web
advocate Bassel Khartibil. This day is the one year anniversary of the
illegal jailing of Bassel Khartibil, well known free internet pioneer,
software engineer, teacher, husband, family-man and friend. Bassel is a
normal guy, in a bad situation. He is now stuck in a Syrian jail cell
where he is not able to directly contribute to his local and global
communities. We demand his captors to #FREEBASSEL!

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked
United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents
ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give
people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government
foreign activities.

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to
keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural
heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is
increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private
corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results
of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like
Reed Elsevier.

The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification is a long-term project that produces documents that investigate the political and cultural implications of state self-documentation. Its work focuses on the processes through which covert government activities are documented, classified for reasons of national security, and, at times, selectively declassified. Founded in 1999 by Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, SAHC has recently completed a series of interviews with government officials involved in the regulation and release of secret government information. Below are excerpts from three of these interviews.

Democracy can be understood in two notably distinct ways. In the institutional view democracy is understood as the interplay of institutional actors that represent 'the people' and are held accountable through the plebiscite; public votes, polls and occasionally referenda. The second view on democracy is radically different in that it sees the extent to which people can freely assemble, discuss and share ideas about vital social issues, organise themselves around these issues, and can freely voice their opinions in public fora, as a measure for just how democratic a given society is.

Today, [September 9] after years of requesting the care she needs for gender dysphoria, Chelsea Manning has released a statement about the start of her hunger strike.

Chelsea is demanding written assurances from the Army she will receive all of the medically prescribed recommendations for her gender dysphoria and that the "high tech bullying" will stop. "High tech bullying," is what Chelsea describes as "the constant, deliberate and overzealous administrative scrutiny by prison and military officials."

This two days event presents keynote speeches, panels and live cinema connected with the understanding of cyborg identities, while exposing power structures embedded in technology and our everyday life. The event is built around the international book launch of The Cyborg: A Treatise on the Artificial Man, written by political Sci-Fi theorist Antonio Caronia (Genoa, 1944 – Milan, 2013), published by Meson Press / Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Starting from the book of Caronia and going beyond it, the analysis will culminate discussing the most recent frontiers of biotechnology and transhumanism.

'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this
right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to
seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and
regardless of frontiers.' -Article 19, United Nations Declaration of
Universal Human Rights